[vorbis] Vorbis vs Speex

[Mr.Radar]

I did some test of my own(see link below for all files and decoders(for 
Winamp)).  For input I used an uncompressed 5 second 8Khz/8bit wave 
file(I recorded myself).  For encoders I used the command line 
SpeexEnc(libspeex 1.0) for Speex, OggDropXPd(for VBR) and the command 
line OggEnc(for CBR) for Vorbis encoding(libvorbis 1.0), and 
WinLAME(LAME frontend) with LAME.DLL(3.9.1) for MP3.  I didn't use 
SpeexDrop because it uses the beta 3 encoder(which may be why it didn't 
fair too well in other tests).  Here are the results(1 being best, 7 
being worst):

File Size
1-Speex(quality 0) (2.44k)
2-Speex(quality 1) (4.27k)
3-Speex(quality 2) (4.79k)
4-MP3(CBR 8kbps) (5.13k)
5-Vorbis(CBR 11kbps) (7.15k)
6-Speex(quality 5) (7.51k)
7-Vorbis(VBR quality -1) (8.75k)

Overall Sound Quality
1-Speex(Quality 5)
2-Speex(Quality 2)
3-Speex(Quality 1)
4-MP3(CBR 8kbps)
5-Vorbis(VBR quality -1)
6-Vorbis(CBR 11kbps)
7-Speex(Quality 0)

Lack of Artifacts(Audible)
1-Speex(Quality 5)
2-Speex(Quality 2)
3-Speex(Quality 1)
4-Vorbis(VBR Quality -1)
5-Vorbis(CBR 11kbps)
6-Speex(Quality 0)
7-MP3(CBR 8kbps)

Overall Speex did much better than MP3 and Vorbis at low bitrate speech 
compression.  Vorbis had a fair amount of artifacting produced the 
largest file sizes and made the voice sound muted.  MP3 had serious 
artifacting problems but it had a wider dynamic range which made it 
sound better than Vorbis and its file size was middle of the road.  
Speex produced the smallest, and best sounding, files with the least 
amount of artifacting although use of Quality 0 should be avoided as it 
has serious quality and artifacting issues(only MP3 was worse).  Speex 
at quality 2 or 1 appears to be the best for low-bitrate speech 
encoding.  I guess that using the 1.0 encoder over the beta 3 encoder 
makes all the difference.

LINK TO FILES: http://webpages.charter.net/tknott/other/speex_test.zip

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